John Bude’s Cornish Coast Murder – A Golden Age British Mystery

Book #29 of 2024

It occurred to me as I read John Bude’s The Cornish Coast Murder that we live in miraculous times. The only reason I was aware of John Bude is because I got a newsletter in my email inbox from Abe Books, an online used book seller. The newsletter discussed a series of classic British mysteries from the 1920s to the 1950s. The Cornish Coast Murder looked interesting, so I went on Amazon using my Kindle, and sure enough, it was available for the whopping sum of $1.99. So I bought it, and within seconds I was reading it in my favorite chair.

None of that would have been possible 30 years ago in 1994 – email was just getting widespread, but it was very primitive. Kindles did not exist. Amazon did not exist! Home Wi-Fi didn’t exist; if you went online, it was via a very slow dial-up modem, and you probably were only on AOL or Compuserve. The internet as we know it was just beginning to get going. Anyway, I think it’s pretty amazing that I can read an obscure British author’s book for less than two bucks, and I never have to leave my house to acquire it near-instantaneously.

So how is The Cornish Coast Murder? Not bad! It was John Bude’s first effort, published in 1935. This was a golden age for British mystery, with Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Edgar Wallace at the height of their popularity. As a matter of fact, in the opening chapter, the Reverend Dodd, vicar of the the tiny village of Boscawen, and his best friend, Dr. Pendrill, eagerly open a crate containing a selection of books by Wallace, Christie, Sayers, J. S. Fletcher, and Freeman Wills-Croft. As they are enjoying a postprandial smoke and sherry, the telephone rings, and it is Ruth Tregarthan, who lives in Greylings – an isolated stone house on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic. Her uncle’s been murdered!

What follows is a fairly formulaic mystery – how was Julius Tregarthan shot in the head when there is no sign of entry, and there are no footprints outside on the muddy path except for Ruth’s? As the story develops, Ruth comes under suspicion, as well as Ronald Hardy, a young man she is in a relationship with that her uncle has violently opposed. Inspector Bigswell doggedly gathers clues and comes up with various theories as to how the murder could have been committed. He welcomes Rev. Dodd’s help, who has a self-described “intuition method” of solving crimes. 

As with most classic mysteries, it turns out Julius Tregarthan was no saint, and he had made many enemies. No one is really sorry to see him gone. My only quibble with the novel is that eventual culprit is someone who is mentioned only briefly early on. Bigswell and Dodd laboriously construct scenarios to fit the changing facts, and Bude can get bogged down in unnecessary complications. However, for a first effort, The Cornish Coast Murder is a well-crafted classic mystery that is a lot of fun to escape for a few hours into. It’s definitely worth a couple of bucks, as far as entertainment value goes.

Simon Fairfax’s 1410 – A Ripping Good Tale

Book #24 of 2024

A good friend who knows I love British history recently gave me the first two books in Simon Fairfax’s A Knight and a Spy series: 1410 and 1411. I just finished 1410, and it is rollicking good fun. Its hero is young Jamie de Grispere, son of wealthy cloth merchant Thomas de Grispere. Jamie has spent his youth on the border between England and Scotland learning how to fight battles under Sir Robert de Umfraville. After his apprenticeship is complete, he is called back to London, where Sir Richard Whittington, spymaster for Prince Hal – the future Henry V – has need of him.

Meanwhile, the master Italian assassin, Christofor Corio, narrowly escapes capture in Paris after he kills a French nobleman who raped his sister. He ends up in the same inn that houses Thomas de Grispere. Thomas decides to employ him as a bodyguard after Christoforo saves him from a gang of thieves.

In Cornwall, a huge wrestler named Mark accidentally kills another wrestler in a match. Even though he is absolved of any blame, the dead wrestler’s family vows revenge, so he leaves for London with a traveling friar.

Jamie, Christo, and Mark all end up together, and 1410 chronicles their adventures as they go undercover to foil the dastardly plots of England’s foes. If you like adventure series like Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars books, or even that classic ’80s television series, The A-Team, then this is right up your alley. Jamie is larger than life; he is almost superhuman in his swordsmanship. Christo is like a ninja, able to move unseen and unheard, while performing incredible acrobatic feats with his daggers. Mark is a gentle giant of extraordinary strength. Throw in an enormous horse that will only obey Jamie’s commands and a devoted wolfhound he rescues from an abusive owner, and you’ve got all the boxes checked.

Their first assignment is go to the French court in Paris and see what the sinister Duke of Burgandy is up to. It turns out he is planning to retake Calais from the English with the help of a huge siege engine he is building in nearby Saint-Omer. While interacting with various personages at the French court, Jamie quickly learns that he must keep his wits about him and trust no one.

Their second assignment is to go to Wales and infiltrate Owen Glyndower’s forces and find out if, when, and where they plan to attack England. Jamie must walk a fine line between pretending to be a renegade from the English court and getting important information out to Sir Richard Grey, who is loyal to Prince Hal.

Throughout these assignments, there are lots of suspense, swordplay, intrigue, and even a little romance. It’s all great fun, with the good guys winning the day, and the bad guys getting their just deserts. Fairfax does a good job of conveying what life was like in medieval England and France, using relatively authentic language. He’s obviously done his homework where it comes to how swordsmen fought, as well as the historical background for the plot. These books are something fun to escape into, especially now that summer is about to begin. I’m already into the second book, 1411!

Ken Follett’s Never – Never Say Never?

Book Number 22 of 2024.

Ken Follett’s Never is a very plausible thriller about the possibility of nuclear war breaking out in the near future. It’s divided into five sections, each one corresponding to a DEFCON level.

The first section – DEFCON Level 1, Lowest State of Readiness – is the longest, taking nearly half of the novel’s length. It opens with a low-level CIA operative, Tamara Levit, who is stationed in Chad. She meets an undercover agent, Abdul John Haddad, a Lebanese-American who is on the trail of a notorious Islamist leader, al-Farabi. He gives her some useful info that leads to a joint US/French/Chad attack on a jihadi base.

Kiah is a Chadian widow with a two-year-old son, Naji, who lives by a shrinking lake in the middle of the desert. She knows there is no future for her there, so she finds a migrant smuggler who will get her to Tripoli, Libya. Her dream is to eventually make it to France where she can find work. Abdul ends up joining her group of migrants, because, unbeknownst to them, their bus has a large shipment of cocaine that al-Farabi intends to use to fund his terrorism.

Tab Sadoul is from France and an attache at the European Union mission in N’Djamena, the capitol of Chad. He and Tamara quickly develop a very serious relationship, even though they are both working for different countries’ intelligence services.

Pauline Green is the President of the United States. She is a moderately conservative Republican who is able to see the big picture when small hot spots develop around the world. 

Chang Kai is the Chinese vice minister for international intelligence. He is married to Tao Ting, one of the most popular television actresses in China. He is young, ambitious, and realistic about what China needs to do to thrive in the future.

All of these disparate characters and their narratives will somehow converge and end up involved in a potential world-ending crisis.

This is the first novel I’ve read by Follett, and I enjoyed it very much. All of his characters are human – flawed, but trying to live their lives to the best of their ability. Even President Green, in the midst of the most demanding and important job of the world, has to deal with her fourteen-year-old daughter’s bad behavior at school.

Follett also does a great job of portraying the petty politics and power plays that occur in every bureacracy, whether it’s the CIA station in Chad, the Chinese ministries in Beijing, or the White House in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, true heroes like Abdul Haddad put their lives on the line to get valuable information about terrorists.

Follett also is very good about providing the perspectives of characters who are not Western. For example, Chang Kai finds amusing US complaints about China’s theft of intellectual property, because in his mind, the West exploited China for hundreds of years. Their disregard of our copyright laws is justified, because we disregarded their rights (in his opinion).

As the DEFCONs inexorably ratchet up, the various subplots come to happy conclusions, but over everything is the spector of nuclear war. North Korea is the tripwire, as Chang Kai in China and President Green desperately try to keep the situation under control. Follett has done his homework – every step of the journey is believable and filled with interesting details. What exactly is the process involved when the US president wants to order a nuclear strike? How accurate are ICBMS, and how effective are missile defenses? How do different factions in China compete for power? Follett does a great job conveying all of these small but important facts.

Never is a hefty 800 pages long, but it is a relatively quick read. Once I hit DEFCON 2: One step from nuclear war. Armed Forces ready to engage in less than six hours, I had to finish the book in one sitting! I also appreciate the fact that for Follett, no particular ideology is at fault in the crisis, but rather short-sightedness and cultural insecurity. Neither President Green nor President Chen of China are warmongers, but they get swept up in events. Follett reserves his contempt and disgust for the radical Islamists operating in northern Africa. They are truly evil persons who have no respect for innocent life.

I highly recommend Never if you’re looking for a thought-provoking thriller. Published in 2021, it is highly applicable to today’s global situation, as mid-level conflicts are threatening to expand into wider ones. I pray what Follett describes never happens.

John Wyndham’s Foul Play Suspected: An Entertaining Early Effort

John Wyndham (1903 – 1969) is best known for his science/speculative fiction books, of which The Day of the Triffids is the best known. Foul Play Suspected was his second novel (the less said of his first, The Secret People, the better), published in 1935, is not science fiction at all, but rather a mystery/suspense tale set in England between the two world wars.

It opens with Phyllida Shiffer – yikes, what a name to burden a woman with! – returning home after a three year stint in India. She is now a widow, and it soon becomes clear that her husband is not mourned by her at all. Her father, Henry Woodridge, is a somewhat eccentric scientist who has a laboratory on the grounds of his estate, The Grange. When Phyllida arrives, the place is empty with all the furniture under sheets, as if her father had planned to leave for an extended period of time.

She can’t get any information about where he might have gone, so she goes to London to see her cousin, Derek Jameson, and find out if he knows anything. He is living in a flat with his friend Barry Long, whom Phyllida dumped to marry Ronald Shiffer. Neither of them have any clue as to where her father might be. She returns to The Grange, and as she is about to eat a quick dinner in the empty house, there’s a knock on the door, and she is swiftly abducted.

From that promising beginning, there unfolds a tale of industrial espionage, murder, and the potential end of the human race. Unfortunately, when he wrote this novel, Wyndham still hadn’t developed a distinctive style. I can tell he’s trying to create a Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie type of story, but none of the characters are really fleshed out. Derek, the putative hero, makes all kinds of wisecracks, but instead of making him endearing, he just comes across as insensitive and snarky. Barry might as well be a piece of furniture. The villain, Ferris Draymond, Director of Amalgamated Chemicals, is as clichéd as his company’s name.

The most interesting character, Detective-Inspector Jordan of Scotland Yard, is very good. Taciturn, smart, and empathetic, he redeems the novel. However, despite his best-laid plans, Draymond manages to outwit him in the end. There is a relatively satisfying ending, but it doesn’t resolve the main issue, which is what will become of a formula for an incredibly lethal poison gas.

Wyndham wrote this in 1935, when it was becoming more and more clear that Germany was re-arming for another war. He includes some prescient commentary on how arms races escalate, and how fragile civilization is. Here’s Jordan talking about how bleak things look for the twentieth century:

“The twentieth century,” said Jordan, “looks like being the bloodiest century on record before it is finished — and I’m not thinking of the war. The system’s rotting. It’s like a city of great buildings. Up in the turrets, on the roof gardens there is clean air in which thrives a clean culture of magnificent possibilities; down below is the accumulated filth and stench of centuries with the foundations rotting among it. … You nicely comfortable people like to think of the bad old days, you pat yourselves on the back because there is more freedom, less cruelty, less meanness in high places than there was a couple of centuries ago. There isn’t. But you’re shut off from it all — you don’t see it. We do. It’s there, and it’s growing. Right under the noses of the really educated class — who, I grant you, aim at a high standard — there is a moral rot spreading like a slow disease. Don’t ask me where it comes from, I don’t know, but it’s there. A callousness, a careless, unnecessary cruelty, a return to Nature. The barriers which civilized, educated men have tried to raise against the raw, the savage and the cruel have never been consolidated, and now they’re giving way. You don’t see quite so much of it in this country yet, but before the end of the century people in your circumstances will be brought face to face with it. You’ll put up shutters on your houses; you’ll go in twos at night.” Location 2558, Kindle edition

Unfortunately for us all, Wyndham’s predictions largely came true. In a few years, he would hit his stride penning such dystopian bestsellers as The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, and Chocky. Foul Play Suspected is a flawed early attempt at what he would later excel at – creating believable and disturbing speculative fiction that makes the reader think.